March 31st, 2008 - More on making flour
After seeing Maggie’s picture, Mac asked if I’d tell you all more about our flour making. Here you are.
First, some time ago, I purchased The Family Grain Mill from Pleasant Hill Grain. The point to me was to make flour w/o using electricity, so I did not buy the motor base, but you can get it that way. I chose this mill based on reviews from the web. I did a lot of searching and reading about them before choosing this one. I think I found another site that was cheaper, but they had a very Y2K mentality that I didn’t appreciate.
Part of the reason I chose this brand is, as the PHG site says, “The Family Grain Mill is a quality mill. Its precisely machined burrs are made of high carbon steel and last a long time. If you ever do wear the burrs out, they’re replaceable.” The main drawback is the rest of the unit is plastic and the whole thing is made in Germany. The burrs don’t produce heat, so they won’t destroy any nutrients by that method.
I also bought the vegetable slicing attachment. There are no photos of it or how it works. I returned it. The feeder is tiny–no more than 3″ square and I’d bet it was around 2″. Most of my zucchini wouldn’t have fit. Most of my potatoes would have, but only because they don’t grow very large. I would have spent a lot of time cutting the vegetables before putting them through the mill. I’d rather just use a knife or a mandoline.
Especially since I can’t use the grain mill in the kitchen. Our counters have a slight rounded lip plus very little clearance before the drawers. There’s not enough room to attach anything to it. (A pasta maker also didn’t fit.) So I have to grind in the dining room. Not a big deal for flour, but would be very annoying for vegetables. unfortunately, our dining table isn’t the best for this either, and I don’t want to clamp it as tight as possible since I don’t want to damage the tabletop. (I use a jar grip for some protection and grip. We have a great one that’s rectangular and just a little large than the base.) The dining table is also a bit low for grinding, although it does enable Maggie to help. I have to leave over just enough that it’s annoying. And it’s not enough that I can do it sitting on a chair. I meant to try our kitchen stools, but I suspect they will be too high.
Separately, I purchase hard red winter wheat berries from The Red Radish, our natural foods store. I started with just a few cups to try it out. Then I ordered a bag of, I believe, 25#. It’s stored in 2 5-gallon buckets in the guest room (coolest part of the house, without using the basement). They are food grade–and the only place I found that sold them was another natural foods store that carries beer making supplies! None of the home improvement/farm stores I checked had food grade buckets. I was able to get locking (Gamma) lids from there, however. With the increase in wheat prices, I’m kind of glad not to have to buy whole wheat flour each month these days. I’d meant to get organic wheat, but the bag was not marked for this. I will make sure the next batch is–this one might have been, they aren’t sure. Since I already had it home and opened, I wasn’t going to return it.
To grind, I get about 6 cups of wheat berries–which, but the way, is too many as it takes too long–and pour them in the hopper. Then we grind. And grind. And grind. You can grind from fairly fine to quite coarse. My preferred whole wheat flour was graham flour, which is fairly coarse. This time, I went finer, at the lowest possible setting. From stores, I go for graham because I know it has all the good stuff in there. At home, I know nothing’s been taken out! In the end, I cracked the last 2 cups or so because I was sore (sciatica) from the 90 minutes of grinding.
Yeah, it’s not fast! I’m pretty slow and steady, too. There were also some breaks. Maggie went potty. We looked at the garden. We let the dogs out/in. Overall, I spent about 2 hours from start to finish with the breaks. In the end, I got about 6 cups of flour plus about 3 cups of cracked wheat. I measured it all carefully once before, but I didn’t this time.
I believe this model has a flywheel attachment, but PHG doesn’t appear to carry it. If you are interested in the mill, explore the whole page and any links you see. The website isn’t very organized in my opinion and many links open in a new window/tab.
And you can grind all sorts of stuff beyond wheat berries. I just haven’t tried anything else. When the new baby’s ready for food (around 6 months, that is), I will use it on other grains. Last time, I ground them up in the blender, but now I’ll use this. (Following advice in Super Baby Food, we fed Maggie whole grain cereals as her first 5 or so foods–rice, oats, barely, millet, etc.)
March 31st, 2008 at 3:30 pm EDT
Thank you! This is great information!